In 24 hours, Lena Aldridge’s life has been turned upside down. She’s lost her job, witnessed a murder, possibly committed a few felonies and been offered the chance to make it big on the Broadway stage by a previously unknown family friend. For the young chanteuse, London’s Soho has always been home, but the lack of a job and entanglement in a murder offer little choice but to board the Queen Mary for New York. But first class on the luxury liner is no safe haven. Lena is goaded by her would-be impresario to woo a wealthy family onboard in the hopes of funding the show, and her status as a biracial single woman from London’s East End has her navigating the minefields of 1930s classism and racism. When the family patriarch suddenly dies by suspiciously familiar means, the truth slowly dawns on Lena: she’s a puppet guided by some unknown hand that could lead to her framed for murder—or ensure she never makes it to shore alive.
British author Louise Hare makes her US debut with Miss Aldridge Regrets, an unexpected take on the traditional murder mystery. Lena’s journey across the Atlantic touches on some of the beloved tropes that readers of golden-age mysteries (like the ones Lena indulges in onboard) will find familiar: the glamorous setting of the Queen Mary, the small circle of suspects brimming with motives, the deft use of poison to pick off victims. Hare adds in a heady mix of class and race to the story, subverting the formula to include the grit typically invisible in those classic mysteries: the lower decks, the not-quite-part-of-the-family servants, the crooked cops.
There’s a lot of grey here, and no one seems more so than Lena herself. Unsure of much of her own history and raised in a world that required steady code-switching, Lena has to walk a very fine line—and sometimes she stumbles. It all leads to an ending that, for this reader at least, felt at best unexpected and at worst out of character. But maybe Hare means it that way, as if to subvert that tidy endings of the very sort of mysteries she’s paying homage to? Or that in real life, justice is really in the eye of the beholder? At any rate, it’s an ending that could certainly spark debate. What is undisputable is Hare’s attention to the ambiance of the 1930s, from the seedy clubs of Soho to the decadent trappings of a transatlantic passage. Coupled with a narrative alternating between past and present that is compulsively readable, Miss Aldridge Regrets heralds good things to come from Hare. Miss Aldridge Regrets is a good choice for fans of Golden-Age mysteries such as Christie or Sayers, readers of 1920s/30s-set historical fiction such as those written by Carola Dunn and Erica Ruth Neubauer, or anyone interested in historical fiction featuring BIPOC characters.